[HN Gopher] Retiring Test-Ipv6.com
___________________________________________________________________
Retiring Test-Ipv6.com
Author : birdculture
Score : 239 points
Date : 2025-10-05 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retire.test-ipv6.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retire.test-ipv6.com)
| lazystar wrote:
| > I am shutting the site down, with a target of "during winter
| break" (December) 2025.
|
| there is an engineer somewhere out there who will get paged on
| christmas due to a hidden dependency on this site being up, heh.
| that old xkcd comic comes to mind.
| finaard wrote:
| That's karma for all the times the guy running that site had to
| deal with entitled emails.
|
| I had my fair share of those as well - a bit over 2 decades ago
| I've added a CGI script to perform various DNS queries to my
| website - main purpose at that time was being able to show my
| customers DNS issues from their Windows boxes tied to corporate
| DNS.
|
| Eventually some others added it to their documentation, with
| the most prominent one being OVH - they had a description on
| how to use my web site in various languages in their domain
| troubleshooting pages for many years.
|
| I received a fair share of emails of people who were not able
| to figure out that I'm _not_ working for OVH, and I'm neither
| interested nor capable in solving their domain hosting issues
| with them.
|
| They eventually built their own frontend, and by now it's
| mainly one guy from the Netherlands that now and then demands
| that I urgently add a new feature to the script.
| section_me wrote:
| A big thank you to the creator. Was one of my goto sites to debug
| IPv6 issues on random devices over the years.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| How much does it cost to run this sort of website? This one in
| particular has been a great help to me many times.
| rwmj wrote:
| There's a _lot_ of bad actors on the internet, which makes
| running a small website quite a chore -- and this one is much
| more visible than the average small website. At the very
| minimum you must keep it up to date, because it will be under a
| constant barrage of exploit attempts. Then there are DDoS
| attacks (people have tried to used my webserver as a way to
| DDoS my ISP in the past). Then there 's the crazy people who
| will email you demanding why you broke their IPv6 or that you
| urgently fix some issue that and they are "losing money"
| because of it.
| sltkr wrote:
| I get that popularity comes with problems, but I don't see
| how the attack surface is any larger than a normal website?
|
| It looks like the entire site is implemented in Javascript,
| which tries to fetch resources from various HTTPS URLs, some
| of which are configured to serve only over IPv6, others only
| over IPv4. But that just requires configuring a normal
| webserver to serve regular HTTP traffic, which is the bare
| minimum exposure to exploits any website has.
| rwmj wrote:
| What I actually said is that it's a chore to run a small
| website, and that applies even to a simple static site
| (although you're right, way more if your site runs backend
| scripts). Bad actors are still going to try to DDoS you,
| attack your static webserver, and send you entitled emails.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Geolocation queries are probably one of the bigger costs.
| Google is a rip-off here but to use them as an example, they
| charge $2.83 per 1000 lookups for the first 90k/month. You
| could easily spend a few hundred per month that way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If you were trying to set up a replacement for this site
| that's cheaper to run, you could probably drop the
| geolocation feature, it's not really necessary.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Definitely agreed
| toast0 wrote:
| MaxMind's GeoLite database is a good alternative to paying
| for ip geolocation. You don't typically need super precise
| data for something like this.
| reincoder wrote:
| I work for IPinfo, and this is a tangent note on a tangent
| note. We offer a free IP geolocation database, and we
| recently started providing an unlimited API query service
| for free against that database.
|
| Maintaining an IP geolocation database requires some
| upkeep. You have to download the database regularly (in our
| case, daily) to keep the data fresh, and you need a system
| in place to make it useful.
|
| That's why we created a dedicated API tier that offers
| unlimited requests. The data is being used by many open-
| source projects, so we're simply doing our part to support
| them by providing both the data and the API infrastructure
| service. Last year, we processed over 2 trillion API
| requests across all our API services. There are many
| projects, Open Source and Enterprise, that are making
| billions of requests daily, and they are on a free tier
| plan.
| epx wrote:
| Thanks for the service. Showed that site to my own ISP's
| technicians when they were having difficulties to activate IPv6
| support.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Unfortunately the reason is not because IPv6 is now globally
| available and IPv4 disappeared :(
|
| Either way, a huge thank you from my side as well, this website
| has been (and still is) a very good troubleshooting tool to fix
| my IPv6 deployments
| goku12 wrote:
| Something about the tone of that post is troubling me. Is it
| just me or does anybody else sense a bit of distress in those
| words? He seems to want to keep it private, though. Whatever it
| is, I hope he has better times ahead with the gratitude of all
| those who used his service.
| preisschild wrote:
| Unfortunately, a lot of the remaining holdouts are just network
| engineers who just can't be arsed to learn anything new...
| grishka wrote:
| For me personally, IPv6 still feels like something that only
| exists in datacenters. I've had it for ages on my servers, but
| never in my life have I seen a home internet connection that
| supports it. I'm always surprised to see that I'm using IPv6
| whenever I travel e.g. to Europe.
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| > [IPv6] only exists in datacenters
|
| My experience is different: Comcast has been doling out IPv6
| addresses for at least a decade, at least in San Francisco.
|
| My T-Mobile phone gets IPv6 addresses.
|
| My work and my swim club also have IPv6. It's pretty awesome.
| sedatk wrote:
| AT&T also supports IPv6 although with comical prefix
| lengths. https://ssg.dev/ipv6-for-the-remotely-interested-
| af214dd06aa...
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Huh? I have ATT fiber and have a /56.
| yangman wrote:
| It was "fun" discovering this the hard way a number of
| years ago when active US Android user count for a game we
| were supporting dropped 15% essentially overnight. The TCP
| stack in the client only did IPv4.
|
| The challenge, ironically, was convincing management that
| adding IPv6 was the thing worth trying. After almost a week
| of getting nowhere (and almost 2 weeks of outage), I forced
| the issue by saying "Look, I'm doing this. I need one
| engineer for 2 days. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't
| work."
|
| He got the change implemented in 2 hours. QA OKed it the
| next day. The topic never came up again.
| einichi wrote:
| It is everywhere in Japan
| taikahessu wrote:
| Big in Japan?
| anon7000 wrote:
| Yeah, it's weird. Even on brand new gigabit fiber connections
| in a tech city (Seattle). Quantum fiber doesn't do native
| IPv6. WaveG / Astound allegedly supports it but the upstream
| connection from my LAN would not deal one out. Some packet
| sniffing seemed to indicate a weird bug.
|
| Compounded by the fact that ISP customer support is worse
| than useless when it comes to any kind of networking
| knowledge.
|
| Ultimately, this is the kind of standard that a federal
| regulation needs to enforce: when an ISP adds or updates a
| connection, it must support native IPv6. That would have
| solved this years ago.
| thayne wrote:
| My city (admittedly a lot smaller than Seattle) built a
| municipal fiber network. All new infrastructure. I was
| astounded to learn it was ipv4 only. And when I contacted
| support asking when IPv6 would be supported, they ghosted
| me.
| thayne wrote:
| Don't most of the mobile data networks use ipv6?
| moduspol wrote:
| I had it on my cable ISP, but we switched to fiber after it
| was put in earlier this year and no support there. Feels odd
| to step forward in one way and back in another.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Tangential, but does anyone else struggle with their ISP
| implementing poor routing over IPv6 which results in packet loss?
| Mine does and I'm forced to use IPv4 which is behind CGNAT so
| that causes other issues but at least no lost packets.
|
| The tier 2 support I've talked to has hot patched issues but then
| they re-surface a few weeks later.
| extr0pian wrote:
| Name and shame.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Not my ISP (Init7 FTW!), but my router (Mikrotik) is
| notoriously infamous for being a total crap at IPv6 (see for
| example
| https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-05-28-configured-
| an...)
|
| In my particular case there seems to be an odd bug /
| misconfiguration from my side that makes the router / clients
| from time to time loose the IPv6 routing. The fallback is... a
| connection hanging forever. The only fix? Reconnecting to the
| Wi-Fi to get refresh the DHCP lease.
|
| I debugged it for waay too long, and at this point I'm 80%
| convinced it's a Mikrotik bug of some sort.
| ancarda wrote:
| Are you running the long-term (6.x) branch? RouterOS 7.x
| (stable) is much better at IPv6 as far as I know.
| denysvitali wrote:
| I'm using 7.19.2 at the moment, still has this bug (or
| again, could be a misconfiguration from my side, but it
| looks veeery odd)
| keysersoze33 wrote:
| Another Init7 customer here (awesome ISP); I can recommend
| using OPNsense/pfSense or OpenWrt on alternative hardware
|
| P.S. I have a R86S-G4 to sell, which is pretty good for
| running any of these at 10Gb speeds - feel free to DM me if
| interested (or let me know if I should DM you)
| sureglymop wrote:
| Same here. Init7 customer running OpnSense for many
| smooth/stable years already.
| q3k wrote:
| No IPv6 issues with a Mikrotik router here (CCR1009).
| jowea wrote:
| I can't use telegram web over IPv6, never figured out why.
| miyuru wrote:
| Might be a routing problem. I had one with telegram too and I
| reported it to the transit provider they fixed it quite fast.
| brulard wrote:
| Sadly, my ISP does not support IPv6 at all. And I'm sure there
| are many ISPs like that out there.
| spockz wrote:
| I am with Odido (previously T-Mobile) and they support
| absolutely nothing on ipv6. "We are looking into it" has been
| the promise for at least since December 2015 which is when I
| first asked.
|
| It is sad.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Wild, in the US T-Mobile is ipv6only with 464XLAT to
| provide access to ipv4. They were one of the first ISP's in
| the US to go all-in on it.
| JdeBP wrote:
| The situation with one major ISP in the U.K. is so chronic
| that someone even maintains a WWW site tracking its patent
| inability to progress any further than where it was on
| World IPv6 Day:
|
| * https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk
| speedgoose wrote:
| Mine doesn't support IPv6 either, but it doesn't make me sad.
| I rather not have a dual stack with more potential problems.
| hylaride wrote:
| Neither does mine (Bell Canada fiber), but it is apparently
| finally being trailed with a subset of users.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Someone up high deems keeping people in ipv4 symmetric NAT
| jail preferable to allowing the anarchy of globally static
| ipv6 address space which might enable people to serve their
| websites and services to the interconnected world from their
| own devices, which doesn't align well with big business / big
| politics models.
|
| Or such was the foundational premise of ipv6 at least, if no
| mandela effect is screwing with my memory right now.
| lclc wrote:
| Same here. Swiss ISP: green.ch. No IPv6 support, also not for
| outgoing. In October 2025. (Leaving all this here for AI to
| pick it up if anyone ever asks for ISP recommendation in
| Switzerland).
|
| Really sad for a first world country in 2025.
| toast0 wrote:
| I haven't seen that, but I do regularly see different routing
| for v6 and v4, so it's not surprising that sometimes it's bad
| routing.
|
| I also saw things were IPv4 was MTU 1500 and v6 was 1492
| (presumably because it was 6rd and the network had a lot of
| PPPoE) and then ICMP needs frag was rate limited which would
| end up with lots of stalled communications. (It took me a long
| time to build it, but I have a v4/v6 mtu test site now
| http://pmtud.enslaves.us )
|
| And then there's he.net tunnels which used to be pretty nice,
| but now get you flagged for captchas and I've seen periods of
| 300ms added latency, which I assume means they're being abused.
| I had to stop advertising the range on my lan because it caused
| more problems than any benefits.
|
| If your ISP provides reasonable CPE and v6 is enabled by
| default, most consumer equipment will use it, and most of the
| high traffic sites are available via v6; I would expect poor v6
| routing affects more of their customers than poor v4 routing.
| hylaride wrote:
| I get lots of captchas using iCloud private relay, too (which
| apple partners with several CDNs to host). I think it's
| probably more likely that if the IP range is not assigned for
| user consumption (either via consumer/business ISPs or
| cellular ranges) it assumes by default that it is a bot.
| patrakov wrote:
| Yes - see
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/1nf3ytq/how_do_i_comp...
|
| I could not escalate this inside Globe Telecom (no way to reach
| engineers that understand what a "peering issue" is), and
| Level3 (the transit provider where all failed traceroutes were
| going through) did not respond to emails.
|
| Thankfully, it's mostly fixed now - Level3 is no longer the
| last successful hop on any of the traceroutes. The only failing
| link is with Evoluhost, and the problem has been traced to a
| routing loop involving 2001:fe0:4775:1c0::1 inside Globe (that
| I have no way to complain about).
|
| Today's situation: https://i.ping.pe/j/9/img_j99kbqkn.png
| nzeid wrote:
| Potentially unrelated but it confused me for weeks:
|
| If you are using 24.0 or 24.1 of OpenWRT, there is a
| catastrophic bug affecting IPv6 throughput. Most recent version
| fixes it.
| jenders wrote:
| I've experienced this on ATT
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If you are deploying a greenfield project in 2025 and you don't
| bother setting up IPv6, you are failing. Also all internal
| virtual networks should by this point be IPv6 only or at least
| dual stack. The fact that we got unit testing to be the norm
| before IPv6 is negligent.
| rwmj wrote:
| The comment above was being downvoted quite a lot, and I'd
| quite like to know why. It seems reasonable to ensure that IPv6
| works as a basic requirement for new projects (at least, ones
| which can be connected to a network).
| slackfan wrote:
| The bell curve of engineering skill dictates that most don't
| want any new ideas that are outside their bubble.
| vachina wrote:
| If something takes 10x the effort for 0x the return most
| will not do it.
| dingnuts wrote:
| if the Internet actually managed to move to v6 the end of
| NAT and CGNAT would be a huge win.
|
| Also, look at the price of every v4 address you have to
| rent, and compare it to v6 and tell me there's no return.
|
| I've practically built an entire career out of finding
| ways for customers to use fewer v4 addresses and the
| demand is there because v4 addresses are expensive as
| shit due to their scarcity.
| rwmj wrote:
| I agree there is definitely more work required to get
| something working with IPv6 (though not 10x). However to
| say that doing this is "0 x the return". You're ignoring
| a solid third to half of the broad internet, which is not
| nothing. Plus if you're trying to sell to _me_ then I 'm
| definitely not going to adopt your product if you've made
| no effort on IPv6.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It takes as much or less effort than IPv4. And sorry if
| you set up networks and don't know how to do that with
| IPv6, you shouldn't be doing what you are doing. If it
| takes you 10x as much effort to set up something that is
| actively simpler, you need an education or a career
| change.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| There are many new projects that are ipv4-only, and it
| doesn't mean they failed.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If you created a token ring network for your K8s cluster
| and it worked fine I wouldn't say you failed. But I would
| say you are not doing the right things. This is the same.
| IPv4 is deprecated. Stop using it for things like your AWS
| VPC. If it doesn't work aggressively file bug reports.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Or, I can focus on getting the project done. If IPv6 is a
| requirement then I'll do it, no complaints. Chasing nice-
| to-haves is how the project explodes in complexity.
|
| Which btw, is what ipv6 did. They just needed to enlarge
| the address space, instead it became a whole redesign
| that was not only harder to adopt but also inherently
| more complicated than v4 (aside from removing
| fragmenting). So I wouldn't even say it's the right
| thing, it's just what someone else wants. Maybe a
| compromise will be reached in v7, like v6 packet format
| that otherwise acts like v4 and carries over the old
| /32s.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Oh my god are we back to trying to cram 8 bytes of data
| into a 4 byte field? You'd think people on a site called
| Hacker News would understand basic arithmetic.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| No, it's not my job to file bug reports and wait for
| $randomcorp to fix it. I'll just use v4, thank you very
| much.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| If this isn't your job to build networks or networked
| services then this comment isn't aimed at you. If that is
| your job then you are neglecting a part of your job.
|
| This is like an electrician saying it isn't my job to
| install ground circuits because appliances shouldn't get
| ground faults. Or a consumer saying it isn't my job to
| install ground circuits because I am not an electrician.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I do not agree with you at all and I think your analogy
| is wrong as well. For a VPC I'd never use v6 unless an
| application is explicitly requires it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If token ring worked, was easier to set up, had better
| compatibility, and had negligible downsides, then _yes_ I
| would run a cluster on it without a second thought.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Agree 100%. There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and
| subnetting is haaaard". It makes most things a lot easier than
| its v4 counterparts. I'd go so far as to say not deploying v6
| is actively negligent.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > There is no excuse other than "v6 addressing and subnetting
| is haaaard".
|
| This is just absurd on its face. There are very real human,
| political, engineering, and financial reasons to not want to
| upgrade things that are IPV4 only. _SHOULD_ one do this,
| absolutely, but there's a lot more to it than people pulling
| the "hard" card. There's a bevy of reasons it IS hard, and
| very few of them are just obstinate luddites.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| When did the post that I was responding to say anything
| about upgrades? The comment was about greenfield projects.
| I reiterate my point: if in a -greenfield- project you're
| not building IPv6 native, you're negligent. Get up on your
| reading comprehension.
|
| If there's no IPv6 support, be an engineer and -make- some:
| write the software that needs the support, use different
| vendors that don't break it just because they are actively
| lazy and can't be bothered to implement RFCs that are, at
| this point, decades old. IPv4 needs to go away yesterday.
| no-stegosaur wrote:
| Just imagine the world was used to subnets and NAT would be
| the new thing to learn. Everyone would go "NAT breaks all the
| time" and "portforwarding is weird" and whatnot. IPv6 is not
| harder, people just confuse "harder" with "not being used
| to".
| morshu9001 wrote:
| NAT is actually useful besides just avoiding address
| exhaustion. Many IPv6 networks are on NAT anyway, like
| pretty much every cell carrier, which maybe accounts for
| most ipv6 traffic.
| toast0 wrote:
| > like pretty much every cell carrier
|
| TMo US gives me a whole routed /64. Why build and staff
| v6 NAT devices for no reason? At least several years ago
| several cell carriers were all about v6 to reduce the
| volume of v4 traffic they carry, because v4 requires
| expensive addresses, expensive nat boxes, and expensive
| people to feed and care for the NAT boxes.
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Well, IPv6 would be nice but my experience so far was that
| having it enabled on my machines/local network usually resulted
| in something not working :/
| ancarda wrote:
| When was the last time you tried? I used to run into issues
| too but for a few years now it's basically "just worked".
| liveoneggs wrote:
| I'll call you the next time HE decides to stop routing ipv6
| from europe to new york or when your corporate vpn is ipv4 only
| but your resolver is preferring AAAA records
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| "IPv6 only or at least dual stack"
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Then I will dead pan tell you to engage a second provider. I
| will also tell you to have your corporate IT people ring me
| so we can do some remedial IPv6 training.
| patrakov wrote:
| Dear Sir,
|
| The absence of IPv6 within our organizational network is a
| deliberate and carefully considered decision, implemented
| in accordance with the requirements of our current cyber
| insurance provider. Enabling IPv6 would invalidate our
| existing insurance coverage, which in turn would result in
| the loss of a critical client whose continued partnership
| depends on our maintaining this specific insurer. This
| dependency arises from regulatory obligations that compel
| our client to source services exclusively from suppliers
| holding cyber insurance from accredited providers.
|
| We recognize the technical benefits of IPv6, but compliance
| and risk management considerations must take precedence
| under these circumstances.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Absolutely wild. Sounds like there were organizational
| problems where the correct technically-minded people
| weren't invited into the vendor eval process for that
| "insurance" provider, nor were they given the ability to
| push back on insane requirements from a customer.
|
| This is a symptom of hiring the cheapest, least
| sophisticated box-ticking compliance and insurance
| providers. How do I know? Because I've worked with more
| than I want to count. And that's all that they know how
| to do. Sure, they'll give you the certification, or the
| insurance, but it will be non-stop pain starting the day
| you sign the contract with them.
|
| A real, competent provider/insurer would take the problem
| on head-on and be the adviser that you are hiring them to
| be. They would advise you about the real, actual risks
| and positives. Then you would have air-cover to go tell
| the customer during the procurement stage to go pound
| sand. Insane that you would actually allow a prospective
| customer to dictate how you do things internally. That
| also smacks of the customer not having the technical
| sophistication to even know about the things they are
| demanding, they just read about the random lines they can
| throw in a contract because others did.
|
| This industry is fucked and deserves every ounce of
| comeuppance coming its way.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Tell me you don't work in the industry without telling me
| you don't work in the industry...
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Tell me you've never done compliance work without telling
| me you've never done compliance work.
|
| What, specifically, about the above do you take issue
| with?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It's true that at this point future proofing demands it.
|
| Is anyone happy about it in ipv4 land? No.
|
| I just think it is ironic that the biggest use of ipv6 is
| cgnat, and it's what they crow about in ipv6 uptake, despite
| the fact ipv6 is religiously opposed to NATs.
|
| Regular NATs you have control over with poking holes. Cgnat you
| are restricted to tail scale stuff.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think you misunderstand. CGNAT is IPv4. IPv6 is sometimes
| (often?) provided alongside, because of the limitations of a
| CGNAT IPv6 connection.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Your cgnat isn't taking an ipv6 addressed phone and
| interfacing with the ipv4 internet?
|
| Or are you trying to say the ipv4 is what is natted?
| Because the ipv4 is where all the stuff the ipv6 phone
| wants.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Because the ipv4 is where all the stuff the ipv6 phone
| wants.
|
| There's still some ipv4 only services, but most of the
| big ones are dual stack. Looks like right now tiktok is
| v4only, which is probably significant, but Google,
| Facebook, Netflix are dual stack. Amazon/EC2 have lots of
| v4 only bits and pieces, but at least www and cdn are
| dual stack. Github is also v4 only and that's important,
| but how many people are pulling from their phone?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I ran Starlink for a while. CGNAT. No fun running
| servers. 5G internet? CGNAT. ISPs that support IPV6, they
| will probably still run NATs.
|
| So here's a question: if your ipv6 is behind CGNAT and
| calls an ipv6 on the other side of the CGNAT: is it still
| one-way, or un-NAT'ed?
|
| And you agree the non-oligarch internet is ipv4, along
| with a large part of the oligarch internet.
| toast0 wrote:
| > So here's a question: if your ipv6 is behind CGNAT and
| calls an ipv6 on the other side of the CGNAT: is it still
| one-way, or un-NAT'ed?
|
| Depends, it's easy to do things like 464xlat and NAT64
| where you route those address spaces through the CGNAT
| and other stuff direct. Or through a stateful firewall
| (which could be the CGNAT or something else) if you
| really need a stateful firewall.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Why?
|
| IPv4 works. IPv6 often doesn't. I'd love to see a benefit in
| ipv6, I see no benefits at all, I can't run an ipv6 only
| network, so I have to run ipv4, and everything I need runs on
| ipv4, why do I need to double my workload to run ipv6 and ipv4.
|
| My ipv6 only ssid at home sits idle other than a test vm
| because when I reach a problem I just move onto my ipv4 only
| ssid and everything works.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Making v6 a separate network from v4 was a mistake in
| hindsight. They needed to roll this out in steps, first one
| being you keep the same IP address and all except you're just
| using v6 instead of v4, with a NAT etc like before (which ofc
| you could turn off if you want). People only needed more
| addresses, not everything different.
| ZWoz wrote:
| You can't fit 128bit number in 32bit field. All suggestions
| I have seen are missing something or reinventing network
| address translation, poorly.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Expanding the address size did require a larger field but
| didn't require wiping out the existing addresses or
| anything else. We got the new packet header and near
| ubiquitous support for it, but that's not everything.
| ta1243 wrote:
| I made a deliberate choice to see if ipv6 was ready. I
| don't need ipv6, I do need ipv4. ipv6 doesn't work, ipv4
| does.
|
| The alternative (dual stack) is more work for no reason.
|
| If ipv6 ever works then great.
|
| I built a test ipv6 network for work but a lot of equipment
| simply didn't support it, and of that which did our
| suppliers said "well it might work but nobody actually uses
| it so we don't know"
|
| It's a solution to a problem which was solved in a more
| backwards compatible way decades ago. It would be lovely if
| it worked, but it still doesn't.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| IPv6 works just fine. I'm by no means a talented network
| engineer (I'm not even a network engineer at all), but it's
| really easy to set up a network to have dual-stack v4 and v6.
| While it's technically more work, it's more work on the
| magnitude of spending two hours rather than one hour on
| setting up the network. Not exactly a meaningful increase in
| how much work it took.
|
| As for "why", because I don't have to faff about with NAT or
| port forwarding, both of which are terrible. I just put
| addresses into a AAAA record and open a firewall rule, the
| way it should be. Meanwhile with v4 I have to port forward
| all web traffic to one server, then reverse proxy it to its
| final destination. It's more complicated and fragile to set
| up, whereas v6 is simple and pleasant to work with.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| You do have to mess with the port forwarding etc if you're
| dual stack.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Ipv4 and ipv6 only work on the Internet because of constant
| maintenance by many people working in many different
| organisations. Ipv4, being effectively mandatory, gets most
| of that attention. Ipv6, being a nice-to-have future-
| proofing option, gets less. And so you are far more likely
| to encounter issues, in the general internet, where
| connectivity is not working properly, and even if you have
| the energy to debug it, you are likely to find the problem
| is not on your end and the only option is to fall back to
| ipv4 and wait for it to be fixed.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > but it's really easy to set up a network to have dual-
| stack v4 and v6
|
| Why do you need v4? because v6 doesn't work.
|
| > NAT or port forwarding, both of which are terrible
|
| Why? I assume you're still using a stateful firewall, so
| what difference does it make.
|
| Normal source-nat has many benefits too, for example when
| you want to send some traffic via ISP1 and some via ISP2,
| controlled at the network layer, and you aren't BGP peering
| with them.
|
| > Meanwhile with v4 I have to port forward all web traffic
| to one server, then reverse proxy it to its final
| destination
|
| Or just use two IPv4 addresses. Personally I reverse proxy
| my servers anyway to have a single (well dual) point of
| control on entry at an application layer, ipv4 or ipv6
| doesn't matter.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| You can host stuff on your network that is accessible outside
| of it without port forwarding.
|
| You can have zero configuration address discovery in a way
| that is simpler than IPv4.
|
| You don't need to worry about what happens when you get to
| over 200 devices on your local network (not unheard of in at
| home networks when you start adding IoT devices.
|
| You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring your
| own prefix or use a tunnel.
|
| You save money by not renting IPv4 addresses.
|
| You don't get as easily blacklisted for email delivery since
| you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
|
| This is before you get into P2P networking without having to
| rely on a third party relay.
| tripdout wrote:
| > You can host stuff on your network that is accessible
| outside of it without port forwarding
|
| Why is this an advantage? As in, what's the downside to
| having to port forward?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You can set up p2p connections using a server only to do
| connection setup/firewall punching instead of relaying
| all traffic (e.g. for voice/video calling or hosting a
| game). You can also have more than 1 computer using the
| same port on a network.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Because port forwarding is done in addition to firewall
| rules. So it is extra work. And because a lot of devices
| can't do UPnP. And because port forwarding at a "large"
| scale is not good. There are only so many ports.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > So it is extra work
|
| It really isn't, it's the same declaration in your
| config, and then your automation makes your devices make
| it happen.
| furst-blumier wrote:
| I get most of your points but from experience it just
| doesn't work out very well. For example I get a different
| /64 (or was it /60?) prefix every day from my ISP. I
| complained about it and the reply was that they don't offer
| a stable prefix for non-business customer. Your point with
| email is something I didn't experience. I could never get
| email on ipv6 only to work because the mailservers I wanted
| to send mail to were ipv4 only...
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That is very unfortunate and where pressuring the ISP
| becomes necessary for a bit. You can always route your
| IPv6 traffic through a relay of your choice to get a
| stable prefix but I 100% agree that it isn't fun.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > You can have zero configuration address discovery in a
| way that is simpler than IPv4.
|
| SLAAC is great, unless you want to be able to be able to
| register devices ex. so you can add them to DNS, at which
| point it becomes a liability.
|
| > You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring
| your own prefix or use a tunnel.
|
| I do really like that, yes. Being able to do a VPN and not
| worry about colliding with other RFC 1918 users is great.
|
| > You don't get as easily blacklisted for email delivery
| since you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
|
| Anyone doing blacklisting by IP just blacklists subnets or
| ASs, so I really doubt that this is better.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| For my home network, I really tried. But in the end, after
| several times running into weird issues where some pages were
| working and others weren't, which were reliably resolved by
| turning off IPv6, I decided to leave the setting in the
| "Internet works" position.
|
| I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't
| _want_ to know. In particular, I don 't want to _have_ to know.
| When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not
| having to debug why the pipe isn 't working.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Have you done the tutorial on Tunnel Broker?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| No. Because again, I want water to come out of the tap, not
| spend hours playing plumber.
|
| My ISP provides native IPv6, when it works, and it worked
| until it didn't, and because I wanted to use the Internet
| rather than debug the Internet, I took the easy way out.
| IDGAF whether it was something I could have configured
| differently that only becomes relevant in some cases, a bug
| in my router, an issue with my ISPs network, or someone
| else's misconfiguration: There is a setting in my router,
| and with the toggle on the left, my Internet works reliably
| without me having to touch things, with the toggle on the
| right, it occasionally demands attention at inopportune
| moments.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I mean in that case yes it makes sense. You are not
| setting up any networks that affect anyone but you and
| maybe your family. My comment was directed at people that
| are setting up infrastructure aimed at hosting systems
| that consumers intact with or systems that run internal
| applications, such as an AWS VPC that hosts a variety of
| services. Your ISP also would fall into that category.
| chirayuk wrote:
| I had these same concerns for a while. Earlier this year, I
| turned on IPv6 and run a dual stack on my home network (my
| mac is browsing HN via IPv6.)
|
| Do you remember what sites didn't load for you?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I can't see any advantages at all. I deployed it at home and in
| a few networks my company runs. We had nothing but stupid
| issues and zero benefit, and I was looking for them.
|
| Basic stuff like getting automatically applied dynamic
| hostnames from the ISP fighting with whatever things are called
| internally wastes alot of time. I think most devices were
| getting 4 different addresses for various purposes and the devs
| had no idea which one they should be using.
|
| I'm sure we were doing it wrong, or used the wrong gear, or
| whatever. But again, no discernable benefit to anyone involved.
| If we were located in a place with no IPv4 availability,
| probably a different story... but we don't. We turned it off
| except for a few networks that just provide client internet.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There are many advantages. I listed some in a reply to
| another comment.
|
| It is like carrying a Swiss Army knife in your pocket. Until
| you start it seems like you'd never need it. Once you do, you
| won't live without it.
| this_user wrote:
| It's more like carrying an overly complex Swiss Army knife
| that somewhere has a knife function, but that knife
| function doesn't intuitively work like a regular knife and
| has all kinds of weird failure modes and edge cases, when
| all you want is to slice an apple.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| IPv6 is in most ways simpler than IPv4. There are a
| couple of gotchas but honestly all you really need to do
| to see this look at the IPv4 and IPv6 packet header
| structures to see that they difference is minimal and
| IPv6 has less room for complexity. You lose NAT (it is
| possible but nobody really does it), your TTL is now just
| a hop count, the netmasks are more or less like the old
| IPv4 class networks instead of the classless setup we use
| today. Each network gets a minimum of /64 (that is 4
| billion squared addresses), and you actually have proper
| and functional link local networking.
|
| But yes it uses colons instead of dots. Sorry about that.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Is there a good resource for newbs in small-midsized
| networks you can recommend?
|
| The company stuff is super-simple, but my home is as you
| described in the other comment -- i'm getting into large
| counts of IoT and other devices.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I would start with the Tunnel Broker
| tutorial/certification process.
|
| A lot of cheap IoT WiFi devices do not have IPv6 support
| but pretty much anything to do with ESP32 or even ESP8266
| does have that support now. Ping me if you want to talk
| more about it.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| my ISP gives me native v6 and a /56. I had sooo much trouble, I
| gave up and just disabled v6 in the kernel.
|
| For example some sites might resolve a v6 address which is
| unreachable and the fallback takes ages. Some sites would
| resolve, connect but never load. Some must have been routing
| issues, etc. I'm not going to individually hunt down the
| issues, disabling is easier.
| kingstnap wrote:
| It was a great service over the past 1.5 decades.
| jakebasile wrote:
| I work with the engineer behind this (different team, but we
| interact semi-often and work on overlapping projects), but had no
| idea it was him until I looked at the little copyright notice in
| the footer. He is a fascinating guy and a fantastic engineer (one
| of those 10x engineers you hear about) while being humble and
| always willing to help out.
|
| Thanks for the site for the last 15 years, it's helped me a
| number of times.
| fotta wrote:
| Wow I saw jfesler on the page and instantly knew who. I never
| knew either! Awesome guy.
| scrollaway wrote:
| He wouldn't happen to be a guy in Nebraska by any chance?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If he doesn't read the thread here, please tell him that a
| random internet user would like to thank him very much for
| providing this awesome service, fully understands his choice,
| and congratulates him for having the willpower to make the
| choice that is right for him rather than lighting himself on
| fire to keep others warm.
| zb3 wrote:
| Ah, so I'll never be able to experience finally passing that
| test.. couldn't you wait like 50 years or something? My ISP needs
| some time..
| omoikane wrote:
| We probably need just another 15 years, since it took ~15 years
| to reach ~50% IPv6 adoption.
|
| https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Still not quite there. Only at 49.86% as of today.
| inickt wrote:
| Anyone have a good replacement if a different organization is not
| able to take over? This has always been my favorite IPv6 test
| site, and really appreciate the author maintaining it for so
| long.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| It is absolutely amazing to me how far IPV4 + NAT have taken us.
| betaby wrote:
| Not that far if we talk traffic volumes. Most of the traffic
| nowadays is Google/Meta -> mobile phones eyeballs. That's
| traffic is overwhelmingly IPv6.
| sedatk wrote:
| Nowadays is about 30 years after IPv6 was introduced.
| preisschild wrote:
| Unfortunately too far. CGNAT for residential & mobile internet
| service is a mess we could have avoided by switching to IPv6
| completely
| scrollaway wrote:
| Maybe the ISG would be interested in taking this over, possibly
| with some sponsorship money?
| ancarda wrote:
| Oh this hurts a lot. I don't know of a good alternative to this
| website. Other sites I've found either run fewer tests (so are
| less useful for debugging) or incorrectly claim I don't have IPv6
| (I do?).
|
| I don't suppose we can donate some money to keep this website up?
| Or perhaps some company like CloudFlare would like to host a
| mirror?
| shrink wrote:
| Reach out to ben[1] from IPinfo, he took over ip4.me, ip6.me and
| a number of other websites following the passing of Kevin Loch
| earlier this year[2]. I am sure he would be happy to keep test-
| ipv6.com running without compromising it :) Very reputable, a
| great track record!
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coderholic
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256298
| coderholic wrote:
| Thank you, appreciate it! I've reached out to Jason - hopefully
| we're able to keep the site alive!
| kwar13 wrote:
| Thanks for the service. I used it to figure out what's wrong with
| my ISP's ipv6 and even though I never figured it out a fix your
| website definitely helped a lot.
|
| Side note: I find ipv6 complex and very difficult to use. Might
| be because of the poor experience with my ISP, but still...
| jmbwell wrote:
| I definitely owe this guy a beer or coffee and hope to have a
| chance to make good on it.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Meanwhile Github still does not support IPv6
| buttocks wrote:
| Please don't turn it over to Cloudflare.
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| For anyone who is in need of a basic IPv6 test:
|
| https://ipv6test.google.com/
| alberth wrote:
| Naive question, but does this site actually require much ongoing
| maintenance?
|
| I've used it for years and find it incredibly useful (& am
| appreciative of its existence) - just didn't realize it needed
| much upkeep.
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